Introduction

More Alaska voters than ever are voting by mail or in early voting this year. This page tracks the numbers as reported by the state.

The data come from the Alaska Division of Elections website It’s a 10-page pdf, so I ran a script using tabula-py to extract the data. Additional summary information is available here.I have republished the data here, where you can download the reports from each day. I had a google sheet that was updating automatically, but that kept breaking. Other caveats: this involves getting reports from all across the state, so there are probably reporting delays.

If you see any errors, contact Ben Matheson. Disclaimer - this may not be fully accurate or up to date. It also may break at any time. This is not official or affiliated with anything…enjoy!

Statewide Early Vote + Mail Ballots Sent, Received, and Rejected

These are the raw numbers for ballots sent to mail voters, ballots receieved, and early votes that were accepted.

Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Received Percent Received Mail Ballots Rejected
119,406 76,324 63.92% 291

Note: these numbers should match what the state has published here.

Overall Early and Mail Vote Compared to 2016

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters and Received by State

Vote By Mail per Alaska House District

Early Voting Totals Per House District.

Early voting started Monday, October 19th. Here are the raw totals of votes in each Alaska House District.

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters, Received by State, and Rejected

District Number District Mail Ballots Received Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Rejected Early Vote in Person
28 South Anchorage 4114 6193 8 1585
24 Anchorage - Oceanview 3114 4612 6 1354
33 Downtown Juneau/Douglas/Haines/ Skagway 3008 5026 7 2078
14 Eagle River/Chugach State Park 2979 4438 15 438
21 West Anchorage 2953 4337 9 1358
26 Anchorage - Huffman 2814 4316 7 1326
27 Anchorage - Basher 2723 4112 7 1100
22 Anchorage - Sand Lake 2674 4048 4 1074
25 Anchorage - Abbott 2509 3848 9 1169
34 Mendenhall Valley 2495 4077 10 2942
31 Homer/South Kenai 2475 4175 8 26
20 Anchorage - Downtown 2469 3741 9 1381
18 Anchorage - Spenard 2446 3696 19 1234
04 Western Fairbanks 2294 3509 6 1780
16 Anchorage - College Gate 2224 3399 8 877
35 Sitka/Petersburg 2117 3273 6 24
17 Anchorage - University 2068 3139 4 969
29 North Kenai 1946 3051 9 37
23 Anchorage - Taku 1860 3022 10 935
12 Chugiak/Gateway 1824 3033 9 1581
11 Greater Palmer 1785 2694 15 2469
10 Rural Mat-Su 1781 2774 6 1394
13 Fort Richardson/North Eagle River 1748 2665 5 287
05 Chena Ridge/Airport 1722 2712 6 1378
06 Eielson/Denali/Upper Yukon/Border Region 1671 2410 3 400
09 Richardson Hwy/East Mat-Su 1650 2575 8 1148
30 Kenai/Soldotna 1587 2782 8 11
08 Big Lake/Point Mackenzie 1410 2237 6 1582
36 Ketchikan/Wrangell/Metlakatla/Hydaburg 1404 2205 15 5
19 Anchorage - Mountainview 1394 2170 5 547
15 Elmendorf 1377 2209 11 482
01 Downtown Fairbanks 1376 2140 6 968
07 Greater Wasilla 1365 2276 5 2265
32 Kodiak/Cordova/Seldovia 1236 2355 2 25
03 North Pole/Badger 1036 1695 3 766
02 Fairbanks/Wainwright 990 1497 3 638
37 Bristol Bay/Aleutians/Upper Kuskokwim 663 1194 7 36
38 Lower Kuskokwim 386 653 0 7
39 Bering Straits/Yukon Delta 304 524 3 304
40 Arctic 289 540 4 15
99 NA 44 54 0 0

Mail Voting Relative to Voter Registration and Voter Turnout per House District

For each Alaska House district, I have the number of registered voters (as of October 3, this report). You can see which districts are seeing more take-up of mail voting relative to their voter base. Additional this compares the 2020 completed mail ballots to the full 2016 election turnout.

This is not really finished yet. Also I just made up the regional labels.

Partisan Explanation on Vote by Mail

This looks at the relationship between relative vote-by-mail activity and voting results from the 2016 presidential election. The y axis is the percentage of mail votes returned relative to the total 2016 turnout. The x axis and color is the margin by which Donald Trump won or lost the district in 2016. The basic trend you see is that the redder the disrict, the less vote-by-mail there is, so far. The key exception is western Alaska (in the lower left), which voted for Clinton but is not seeing much vote-by-mail participation yet.

Voting Method Breakdown by House District

Mail and Online Rejections Per House District

About

The Alaska Division of Elections data is originally is published in a 10-page PDF that I parsed to extract the data. This uses a combination of R and Python. The Python uses Tabula to pull out the data. After that, an R script cleans out extra spaces, gaps, and labels the rows by house district and adds descriptions. I wanted to do everything in R, but I couldn’t get rJava loaded for the Tabulizer, so the tabula-py library ended up being more expedient.

This page is an RMarkdown document that calculates some summary stats, like percent rejected and then displays the data in several ggplot2 plots. The PDF parsing in particular may be brittle and this could definitely break at anytime.